Pamela knocked at the office door while he and Domingo Quiroga were searching the Web (when they could get online) and (when they couldn’t) the Hermosillo phone directory for a roofer to repair the cracked dome.
He rose from his chair and let her in. She was dressed as if she meant to go to work that morning: a khaki shirt worn outside faded jeans, her hair pinned up under a bandanna. A straw tote bag swung from her shoulder.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” Riordan said, smiling.
“You said ten.”
“Around here that could mean any time between now and noon.”
“Lisette calls me pathologically prompt—another condition from my Wasp upbringing.”
Her hand made an awning over her mouth, apparently to hide the one blot on her beauty: teeth needing a good orthodontist. Odd, Riordan thought, that she hadn’t had them fixed. He told Domingo to carry on with the search and led her outside, around the church, then into it through a side entrance, the front doors being locked.
“You’ve already started?” she asked, gesturing at the scaffolds.
“I had four people in here. They commuted from Hermosillo. They quit on me a few months back. Because of the narcos. They were afraid of being kidnapped.”
“That’s encouraging. Well, can I see?”
When he flipped the light switches, illuminating the twenty-four bulbs in the silver chandelier, she flinched.
“I know: it’s a bit—well, more than a bit—busy,” he said.
Her glance darted up, down, to each side. There was too much for the eye to settle on any one thing: trompe l’oeil tiles low on the nave walls; depictions of pomegranates, bells, Franciscan cords, vines, angels, and grotesques higher up; the ephod symbolizing Aaron, the first priest; murals portraying the four evangelists; the gilded, baroque estipites above the altar, looking like giant candles dripping golden wax.
“Busy? Busy?” she said, with a lift in her voice. “It’s overwhelming.”
“It is at first, and there’s more in the transepts. But it’s really quite harmonious. If you sit in here and meditate, you can feel the harmony seep into you.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.” She italicized the statement with a skeptical look.
“The harmony comes from mathematics. Mission churches in Mexico were built on mathematical principles. The idea is that mathematics leads you to God.” He’d fallen into his donnish mode. “It comes from the Spanish, and they got it from the Muslims, from the Moors.”
“The Mudejars,” she said. “And they picked it up from the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras, Plotinus, that bunch of geniuses.”
He’d never met anyone who wasn’t a scholar of early Spanish architecture who knew this. “That’s right! Right, right!” he gushed. “All numbers come from one, and the Creator is the One from whom all things come.” He pointed at powder-blue cherubim flying across the white cupola toward its apex. “Under there are the trusses and beams that … what’s the word I want? That come forth from the ridgepole. The trusses and the beams from the center of the circle are the radii. They represent the way God bestows being on his creation. The divine will is expressed in the radius. I’m boring you?”
She shook her head. “Confusing me maybe.”
“I like people to know that all this in here isn’t decoration, and the building itself isn’t merely architecture. It expresses praise to God.”
“Uh-huh. Can you show me what needs doing?”
“Everything. Which would take a team of skilled people three or four years. I’m hoping you might be able to fix up the murals, those and those.” Waving his arms, he indicated Matthew and Mark, peering through the scaffolds in the left side aisle toward Luke and John on the right. She handed Riordan her tote bag, then scaled the rungs to the narrow platform fifteen feet above and sidled along it, examining flakes in the paint, the blotches marring Saint Mark’s face, like a skin disease. Riordan called to her that he couldn’t join her because he was afraid of heights. As she climbed down, he found it impossible not to notice her shapely bottom, not to feel an attraction. On home leave a few years ago, as he was driving with his father down Michigan Avenue, the old man—he was then seventy-eight—ogled a woman young enough to be his granddaughter and almost ran a red light. “Lord, Dad, does it ever stop?” Riordan asked. “When you’re dead,” his father replied. “And if it stops before then, you might as well be dead.”
Crossing to the opposite side, Pamela went up again, nimble as a gymnast, and studied the damage to Luke and John.
“He was the best writer of the four, Saint Luke was,” Riordan said. “Acts reads like an adventure novel. Shipwrecks. Imprisonments. Dangerous journeys in distant lands.”
He turned aside as she came down to keep his eyes off the tight curve of her rump.
“What Acts?”
“The Acts of the Apostles.”
“You’re talking to an arch-heathen. I haven’t seen a Bible since my parents forced me to go to Sunday school, and I don’t remember a word of it. Another reason I may not be the one you want for this job.”
“Competence, not faith, is the requirement,” he said, heartened by the “may.”
“Yeah. Like I said yesterday, I’m not too sure about that, either.”
“To further disincentivize you, I couldn’t pay you a penny or a peso. We had a modest restoration fund, but most of it was used up. The rest of it and then some is going to fix a crack in the roof.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything,” she said airily. “If I come down here, and if I decide to take it on, it would be for Lisette’s sake. She seems to think I’d go bonkers without some big project that would get me out of the house. And maybe she’s right.”
“I hope you decide to help out. Someone with your eye, your talent, a painter of your caliber—”
“Could I hire you as my publicist?” she said, with a wink in her voice.
“I once taught art history in high school,” he said. “Might have been a painter myself, but I’ve been told that to be a great artist, you need to have had an unhappy childhood. A cliché, I suppose.”
“Sometimes clichés are clichés because they’re true.”
“I was the victim of a happy childhood,” he said, aware that he was talking too much. “Oh, my dad drank too much before he quit. But he was a functional drunk. A fun-loving drunk. There were eight of us. He used to say that he and my mother practiced the rhythm method so all their kids would know how to dance.… Sorry,” he added when she winced at the stale joke.
He brought her to the transepts to show her, on the west wall, the fresco of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her blue-mantled figure surrounded by an almond-shaped sunburst. Pamela squinted at it through the scaffold’s lattice, the corners of her lips dropping to form pockets in her jaw, like dents in a walnut. Strange how he found even this sour look charming.
“The gold leaf in that halo—” she started to say.
“Mandorla, it’s called.”
“Restoring that would take a lot of work,” she said, and sat down in the transept’s front pew, placing a notebook from her tote bag on one knee.
Sitting next to her at a discreet distance, he felt an invisible yet tangible force flow through the space between them. It plucked at his sleeve, tugged at him to draw nearer. He resisted, his memory retrieving the scolding voice of Sister Josefina, his eighth-grade teacher. That time during first Friday Mass when she’d caught him passing a heart-shaped mint, inscribed with the question “How’s Chances?” to a girl he was in love with … what was her name? Sandy. Sandy Cahill. “Here, in God’s house? You’re a bad boy, Timothy Riordan. Bad, bad, bad.” A good thing Pamela was gay; it provided a restraint where his own will might fail, as it had once, though it wasn’t raw lust pulling him toward her here in God’s house: a yearning, rather, to touch and be touched by her, the hunger for human affection that, his confessor in Rome had told him, a priest could curb through a deeper intimacy with God. The implication being that his hadn’t been deep enough.
Pamela began to make notes, then paused to gaze at the painting. An unusual depiction of the Madonna, she said. Nothing like the ones you saw in Europe—the dark complexion, the straight black hair.
“It’s a mestiza girl,” he explained. “This one’s a copy of the original in the basilica in Mexico City.”
He told Pamela about the legend: how in the early days of the Spanish conquest, a maiden appeared to an Aztec Indian named Juan Diego on a hill outside the city. The apparition identified herself as the Mother of God and asked for a church to be built there in her honor. Juan reported his vision to the archbishop, who instructed him to return to the hill and ask the maiden for a sign to prove she was who she claimed to be. Request granted: she miraculously cured Juan’s uncle of a disease and caused flowers to grow on a hillside where none had grown before. Flowers not native to Mexico, Castilian roses. Juan gathered them up in his cloak and returned to the archbishop. When he opened his cloak, the blossoms fell to the floor, forming an image of the Virgin.
“That Indian and the archbishop must have been eating mushrooms that hadn’t grown there before,” Pamela quipped, then brought two fingers to her lips. “Oops! Sorry. Maybe you believe that story?”
“My parishioners do. Ninety-five percent of Mexicans do. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a kind of cult in this country. She’s a national icon.”
“So even if you don’t believe it, you’d better pretend you do?”
This struck him as another “oops,” but she did not apologize for it.
“How did you come to be a priest? Just curious. You don’t seem like the type.”
“I wasn’t aware that there was a type.”
“Maybe not.”
“I’ll tell you on the condition that you tell me why you became an artist.”
“Fair enough.”
“A long story,” he said. “I’ll abridge it. I dropped out of Notre Dame in the middle of my sophomore year. I was restless, and I hit the road. Three months later, I fetched up in Mexico, a town not far from where we’re sitting, Yécora. Dead broke and half-starved. The local priest found me asleep in the church. He fed me, gave me a job washing dishes, sweeping floors, helping him out with one thing or another. He was a remarkable guy, Father Batista, a Franciscan. He was always fighting with the municipal government for his parishioners. Not a fist-pumping sort of fighter. He was the most serene man I’ve ever known. If there was work to be done, he’d pitch right in. Sometimes I’d work alongside him, and we’d be fixing a corral or nursing a sick burro and he’d be discussing Augustine’s commentaries on Scripture or Aquinas’s philosophy, like we were in a seminar room.
“The time I remember most clearly, because it made all the difference in my life, was when he got word that a crippled old man way off in the Sierra Madre wanted to take Communion. The only way into his village was on foot or on muleback. No mule to be had, so Father Batista walked. He was older than I am now. It was late winter, March, and a cold rain was falling. He left at daybreak, didn’t get back till after sunset, drenched, shivering, beat to the bone. I asked him why he’d gone through all that just to give one old man Communion, and he said he’d done it for selfish reasons, meaning that it made him happy. ‘Please explain,’ I said, and he answered, ‘The greatest happiness is to serve those whom no one else will serve.’
“I left a few days later, flipped a bus to the border with the money he paid me. I kept thinking about him and what he’d said, and sometime during that ride, I heard a voice inside my head telling me that I had to become like him. It was in my head but not my voice. And that was when I knew. Your turn.”
She crossed her legs primly and, throwing an arm across the back of the pew, swiveled in her seat to face him directly. “Kind of the same thing.”
“What is?”
“Art is a calling. I didn’t hear voices or anything like that, but I didn’t have a choice. I don’t do what I do because I want to. I have to. Maybe I could have been a suburban hobbyist, you know, turning out passable stuff in a studio my investment-banker hubster built for me, showing at local galleries, drinking bad sauvignon blanc from plastic cups; maybe I would have done that if I hadn’t been bi. But I was, I am…” She hesitated, then added, with a certain emphasis: “Bipolar, that is.”
Riordan’s cheeks warmed. Had it shown on his face, and had she noticed it? The little thrill of interest—no, of hope mixed with dread—that had flickered through him because, for an instant, he’d thought she’d meant bisexual?
“It set me apart,” she continued. “Yeah, that’s a cliché, too—that the artist has to be an outsider looking in, but she does.”
Composing himself, he said, “I wouldn’t have thought it. You seem so … is it reserved? Not that. Self-possessed.”
“I’m not off-the-wall bipolar. The diagnosis was hypomanic. My ups don’t reach the peaks, so my downs don’t hit rock bottom, and lithium takes care of the rest. I know I started this, but let’s stop before we get into too-much-information territory.”
“I’ll second that.”
She resumed her note-taking. One list of the work that needed doing, she said, another of the necessary materials: ammonium caseinate, dehydrated mortar, retouching paints.
“Do I take it, then, that I can count on you?” he asked.
“No promises.”